Archive for the ‘rightwing moral cripples’ Category

two controversial new books describe a Vatican awash with cash that is woefully mismanaged, where senior officials pour church funds into their already-lavish apartments, and where even the office that researches candidates for sainthood has had its bank accounts frozen out of concerns about financial impropriety.

According to Gianluigi Nuzzi’s Merchants in the Temple, due to be published on Thursday, one high-ranking Vatican official, Monsignor Giuseppe Sciacca, was so keen on improving his apartment that he took it upon himself to knock down a wall separating his flat from his elderly neighbour’s. When the elderly priest returned from hospital, where he had been very ill, he found his things had been packed in boxes.
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Avarice, a work by journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi also to be released on Thursday, delves into allegations of financial shenanigans, including an allegation that the Vatican’s former secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, used €200,000 (£142,000) from a foundation meant to support the Bambino Gesù paediatric hospital in Rome to renovate his own apartment.

Like this:

Last week Anonymous released a press release stating they would be revealing the identities of 1,000 Ku Klux Klan/KKK members, and the news lit up social media within minutes. The Daily Kos article which has also appeared on Anonymous Twitter pages reached over a million people and garnered over 80,000 Facebook likes/shares in a matter of days. Dislodging and unraveling the KKK is something the public has been craving for decades.

I don’t know how they’re going to pick those names or where they got them from, but to the extent that they include members of the military, of police forces, of the Legislature, or of the Judiciary–or anyone who holds a position of public trust–the release of names of extremists is reasonable. We don’t want a left-wing version of McCarthyism, but neither do we want people who have falsely sworn an oath of allegiance to the United States serving in positions of trust.

A young Jewish American man has been charged with pretending to be an Australian-based Islamic State jihadist after a FBI joint investigation with the Australian Federal Police based on information provided by Fairfax Media. Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a 20-year old living at his parents’ house in US state of Florida, is accused of posing online as “Australi Witness,” an IS supporter who publicly called for a series of attacks against individuals and events in western countries:
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Early on Friday, Australian time, Goldberg, who is non-Muslim and has no real-world links with extremism, was arrested at his home by Florida police for “distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction”.

Goldberg had several online personas: an Islamic radical who was popular in ISIS social media; a white supremacist on hate site Daily Stormer; a feminist on Daily Kos; a radical free-speech advocate on Q&A site Ask.fm, and a sympathizer with GamerGate. Goldberg is also accused of being behind a Times of Israel blog post that called Palestinians “subhuman.”
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Goldberg, who comes from a Jewish family, had Australi Witness spout a special kind of rage when discussing Jews.

“The Jews are the worst enemies of Allah (SWT). When Islam conquers Australia, every single Jew will be slaughtered like the filthy cockroaches that they are,” he wrote on JustPaste.it.

Goldberg as Australi Witness also threatened attacks on synagogues in Melbourne and Los Angeles on JustPaste.it and on 8Chan’s Islamic State page.

He also had recurring obsessions with certain people and ideas, attacking them with one persona while praising them with another.

Goldberg also had another alter ego, Tanya Cohen, whom he attacked using Michael Slay on the Daily Stormer. Cohen was evidently a parody of far-left social justice activists. Slay called her “a Jew bitch who specializes in writing about how the US needs to ban ‘hate speech’ and any other speech that goes against the Jewish cultural Marxist agenda.” An email in Tanya Cohen’s name was linked to Goldberg’s IP address, and articles in her name appeared on Thought Catalog, Daily Kos, and feminist website Feministing.

On Twitter, Goldberg frequently posted about Gamer Gate, a controversy about sexism in gaming that resulted in personal attacks on feminist activists. While Goldberg doesn’t appear to have posted any threats on social media, his tweets used the hashtag #gamergate to mock people he had previously derided as “social justice warriors.”

In articles published under the Moon Metropolis alias and under Goldberg’s own name on Thought Catalog, he expresses the opinions of a free-speech fundamentalist.

“Nothing that anyone could possibly say could ever be worse than a law preventing them from saying it,” he wrote. “If you expressed the opinion that I should be killed, I would still defend your right to say that.”

And it appears that may have been Breitbart.com’s “source” for claiming that Shaun King, an activist who posts regularly on Daily Kos regarding Black Lives Matter issues, is not partly African American. Anomaly on FreakOut Nation posted evidence from social media to that effect. While I haven’t seen evidence beyond the BlazingCatFur post, the evidence persuades me that this is likely so. It has been denied by “Nero” aka Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart writer.

The charge that a terrorist troll had anything to do with our reporting is a crackpot internet conspiracy theory. http://t.co/8YJTfMUwvX

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, currently running for the GOP presidential nomination, linked the church murder to his pet topic, the “assault” on religious liberty.
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On the same program, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also confessed to being baffled about possible motives. “We have no idea what’s in his mind,” he said. “Maybe he hates Christian churches. …”
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South Carolina Senator and presidential candidate Lindsey Graham questioned whether this was a “hate crime” and tried to suggest factors other than race were involved.

Most digustingly, Roof prayed with the congregation before massacring them. What greater act of blasphemy is there than to ask God for aid just prior to destroying those made in His image?

And of course John Lott is out there saying the reason that Dylann Roof murdered those nince people is that they didn’t have any guns in church.

Because, of course, Jesus Christ was such a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. He owned a Glock and a Heckler & Koch.

This is the real Emanuel AME church, courtesy of Harry Bruinius of the Christian Science Monitor:

The seeds for Mother Emanuel were planted in 1791, during the era of “the segregated alter”: A group of slaves and free blacks worshiped under the auspices of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church, a white denomination that provided the group’s ministers. But in 1816, when the white congregation decided to use the black members’ segregated burial grounds to erect a new building, they broke away, joining the nascent movement of black Christians that would become the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

One of the new congregation’s founding members, Denmark Vesey, a slave of a slave trader, organized a major slave revolt. City officials crushed the rebellion before it began, hanging Vesey and at least 34 others. The incident sparked other violence, and a white mob burned the church – and eventually, officials banned independent black churches outright in Charleston.

The Republican Party is surely going to hell for using this evil deed to spin their talking points. I just wish the good Lord would grant them early entry.

Debate moderater Kyle Clark to GOP Senate candidate Cory Gardner] “So let’s instead talk about what this entire episode may say about your judgment more broadly,” Clark said. “It would seem that a charitable interpretation would be that you have a difficult time admitting when you’re wrong and a less charitable interpretation is that you’re not telling us the truth. Which is it?”

Democrats lost the Congress in 1994 not so much because of gun control legislation pushed by the Clinton White House, nor because of union disaffection with NAFTA, nor because of Hillary Clinton’s incompetence in putting together healthcare reform, although all of these contributed, but because of right-wing money used to corrupt elections and the media. The most effective of those efforts was right-wing talk radio, demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, who could never have remained on the airwaves had the FCC continued to enforce the laws that required that the airwaves must be of benefit to the community. Indeed, Limbaugh was in part a creation of Republican operative and Fox Noise chief Roger Ailes:

…Ailes’ most important contribution to the covert campaign involved his new specialty: right-wing media. The tobacco giants hired Ailes, in part, because he had just brought Rush Limbaugh to the small screen, serving as executive producer of Rush’s syndicated, late-night TV show. Now they wanted Ailes to get Limbaugh onboard to crush health care reform. “RJR has trained 200 people to call in to shows,” a March 1993 memo revealed. “A packet has gone to Limbaugh. We need to brief Ailes.”

But demagogues are of little use unless they are fed talking points. Joe Coors bankrolled the Heritage Foundation to produce laughably false talking points precisely so that these lies could be spread through conservative propaganda outlets like the Limbaugh show. Heritage became a Scaife property, along with countless other institutions devoted to undermining the ability of the American people to govern themselves.

The American Spectator was funded by Richard Mellon Scaife. The American Spectator used pseudo-investigative reporting to unearth gossip and rumors about Bill Clinton. His alumni and/or funding is behind such credits to the journalistic profession as WorldNet Daily and Newsmax.

Scaife left a small fraction of his fortune to the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art. His inherited assets go to the conservative Sarah Mellon Scaife and Allegheny Foundations to carry on his work of scarring America. And the rest to the Scaife Revocable Trust.

Scaife donated $100K to The Clinton Foundation. And Bill Clinton, ever desperate for approval, not only forgave his old enemy, but gave a eulogy at his funeral.

As someone who spent countless hours defending Bill Clinton, I am sorry I wasted the time. Richard Mellon Scaife tried to destroy democracy in this country. He largely succeeded. It is not enough to fight fiercely for what you believe, as Clinton eulogized. Every vulture, every jackal, every shark does the same. What matters is a commitment to truth and to justice. Bill Clinton has eulogized savagery, and spit on truth and justice. I cannot but wonder whether Clinto would have reconciled with Scaife if Scaife had not donated to the Clinton Foundation.

One need not hate Richard Mellon Scaife–I do not–to recognize that he was the enemy to everything good and decent about America. One need not hate Bill Clinton–I do not–to recognize that he is indeed amoral, though not in the ways his enemies said.

“The evil that men do lives after them, while the good is oft interred with their bones.” —Marc Antony in Julius Caesar
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Update. Christopher Reed, The Guardian:

Then came his [Scaife’s] curious London adventure. His father had become an officer in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, in second world war London, and Scaife maintained an interest in clandestine activities. In 1973 he bought Kern House Enterprises, a US firm that ran Forum World Features, a London-based supplier of articles to dozens of newspapers around the world.

However, in 1975 a CIA memo from seven years earlier came to light. It described Forum as a propaganda unit sponsored by the CIA to combat communism and to further conservative politics. Scaife quickly withdrew his money amid widespread unfavourable publicity about the syndicate.

For anyone who knows the history of the religious right, the possible revocation of tax-exempt status for claimed religious belief is a potent flashpoint. In his book, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament, religion historian Randall Balmer argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, which Balmar calls the “abortion myth”, evangelical voters were not propelled to political activism by the supreme court’s 1973 decision in Roe v Wade.

Instead, the issue that mobilized these voters was the IRS’s 1975 revocation of the tax-exempt status of the segregationist Bob Jones University. Rightwing religious architect Paul Weyrich told Balmer that it was “the federal government’s moves against Christian schools” that actually “enraged the Christian community”.

Give us our goodies or we’ll take over the government. [More at Daily Kos]

This is relevant because the right’s latest hissy fit comes from our…eh…friend…Cong. Aaron Schock, who is claiming the IRS targeted antabortion groups over their prayers. Posner notes:

Questioning anti-abortion groups – even the content of their prayers – could very likely have been aimed at determining whether these groups engaged in activities outside abortion clinics that ran afoul of the law. Because of the history of abortion clinic violence by those claiming a religious imperative, the IRS could have been attempting to determine whether the groups’ activities were in violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (Face), a 1994 law which prohibits the use of force, the threat of force, or physical obstruction to injure, intimidate or interfere with someone’s access to or provision of reproductive health services.

The coolest story is this one, from Reuters:

Atheists should be seen as good people if they do good, Pope Francis has said in his latest urging that people of all religions, and none, work together.

The leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics made his comments in the homily of his morning mass at his residence, a daily event at which he speaks without prepared comments.

He told the story of a Catholic who asked a priest if even atheists had been redeemed by Jesus.

“Even them, everyone,” the pope answered, according to Vatican Radio. “We all have the duty to do good,” he said.

I’m glad to hear this from a Pope. After all, who is doing what Jesus wants? A person who denies God but feeds the poor, or someone who spends all their time in church and never does a good deed?

Speaking of people who spend their time in church but don’t do good deeds, I have to wonder what God is thinking about this fellow (from Kim Wilsher, The Guardian):

Dominique Venner, 78, a far-right essayist and historian took his life in front of the altar at Notre Dame on Tuesday after writing a blog condemning France’s recently passed law allowing same-sex marriage and adoption.

The cathedral was evacuated after Venner walked into the building with tourists at about 4pm, placed a letter on the altar, then shot himself through the mouth. Hundreds of visitors were evacuated.

Afterwards, Le Pen, head of the far-right Front National, tweeted her “respect” for Venner and said his death was an “eminently political” gesture.

Before killing himself Venner sent a letter to friends saying he was in good health in body and in mind, was filled with love for his wife and children, and loved life.

He had written: “I expect nothing more from life except the continuation of my race and my spirit. However, at this, in the evening of that life and in the face of immense dangers for my French and European heritage, I feel the need to act, while I still have the force. I believe it is necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that oppresses us. I offer what remains of my life in an act of protest.”

Venner said he chose Notre-Dame as a “symbolic place … which recalls our immortal origins”; the reason for his suicide would be evident from his recent writings.

The historian had described France’s same-sex marriage bill, known as the “marriage for all” law, as vile. It passed into the statute books on Saturday after months of furious and often ferocious debate, protest and violence.

Venner was a former member of the Secret Army Organisation, which opposed Algerian independence in the early 1960s and waged a terror campaign against Charles de Gaulle’s government.

I can imagine an awkward conversation, beginning with “Dominique, what was it about ‘Thou shalt not kill” that was so hard to understand?”
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Added: An important primer on Opus Dei in Latin America I wanted to link, which describes the interference of Opus Dei, presumably in the form of Cardinal Maradiaga, in preventing emergency contraception.

Diageo, one of the world’s largest drinks companies, has announced it will no longer fund the Heartland Institute, a rightwing US thinktank which briefly ran a billboard campaign this week comparing people concerned about climate change to mass murderers and terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson and Ted Kaczynski.

On Thursday, a billboard appeared over the Eisenhower Expressway in Illinois showing a picture of Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who in 1996 was convicted of a 17-year mail bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens. The caption read: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” A day later it was withdrawn.
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Its website is still hosting the original press release, which includes the claim that the “most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Microsoft, which has a policy of supplying free software to all non-profit organisations in the US, posted a blog on its website on Saturday distancing itself from Heartland.

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I do not understand why, in discussing Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of Sandra Fluke as a “slut” because she wanted health insurance to include birth control (Limbaugh called this “being paid to have sex”) that almost none of those who spoke in opposition to Limbaugh noted many of the women who use birth control are married. As Keith Olbermann (the only person I have heard who made this obvious point) said, Limbaugh probably just called his four wives and his mothers prostitutes.

Nor has anyone asked whether people who have insurance against cancer, including prevention, are being paid to have cancer, another rather obvious question. [Added: or, for more perfect parallelism, paying to get anally probed. What does that make Rush?]

I am not surprised that Democrats/liberals/feminists/etc. lose rhetorical battles when they are so poor at listening to their opponents.

Perhaps they imagine that no one could be so morally sick that they would deny health insurance to people at risk of getting cancer. But what poor imagination, considering that for sixty years the right wing has denied that insurance to tens of millions of people annually, leading to death and suffering that probably exceeds all of the American casualties of World War II.

Yes, they are that bad. It would help if the people who represent progressive causes would stop sputtering and start really listening.
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Added: What makes Jon Stewart a great comedian? He listens to what people are actually saying, and verbalizes it. The problem with progressive spokespeople like NOW president Terry O’Neill, is that so many of them trained in the law, while so few of them trained in being class clown, which is where the real action in rhetorical efficacy is to be found.